At the start of the year, US telco Comcast announced the launch of ‘Universal Ads’, a new buy-side offering that the company says is designed to give advertisers of all sizes access to premium TV inventory. The project is notable in part for its reach across America’s major TV businesses — NBCUniversal, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, A+E, AMC Networks, and Roku are among those whose inventory is available on Universal Ads’s self-serve platform.
For broadcasters, tapping the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market for ad dollars represents a major opportunity. Collectively, SMEs represent a major portion of the total ad market in America, and the tech giants have done a good job of hoovering up a lot of their ad dollars. But CTV’s ability to deliver targeted campaigns to specific audiences, and in some cases to link back ads to real-world outcomes, enables TV businesses to compete for SMEs’ ad spending.
Providing scale across multiple broadcasters, as Universal Ads does, is just one piece of the puzzle. Many SMEs wouldn’t even think about running national TV ads, assuming it to be too broad and too expensive, so raising awareness and bringing advertisers onto the platform represents its own significant challenge.
Universal Ads has announced a new partnership which represents a fairly novel approach. The company has agreed an integration with Ramp, a financial operations platform which offers corporate cards, expenses management, and various financial workflow tools. Ramp users can access $500 in advertising credits on Universal Ads, according to a landing page on Ramp’s website.
It’s not necessarily the sort of partnership an ad-buying platform would typically have. Ramp’s offering doesn’t directly relate to advertising (though Ramp’s chief business officer Colin Kennedy said the partnership fits with Ramp’s goal “to help businesses get more out of every dollar and hour”).
Universal Ads’ general manager James Grant however says that Ramp’s customers are the sorts of brands which Universal Ads was built to serve. And the Ramp integration offers a quick way to raise awareness among Ramp’s 30,000 business customers. “As these businesses explore tech-forward ways to grow their profiles and reach their business goals, there’s no matching the opportunity to reach audiences at scale, alongside the premium inventory we offer.”
Using TV to advertise TV
Universal Ads is by no means the only business looking to bring SMEs into the TV advertising world. Ad tech businesses MNTN and Vibe, neither of which are owned by a media company, also operate in that space.
For all of these companies, spreading the message across the wide but fragmented market of SMEs is a challenge. One approach, which both MNTN and Vibe have used, is to use their own tech to advertise their own products — targeting SME owners using CTV ads.
Universal Ads meanwhile says it will continue to lean on demand-side integrations, and will look at further partnerships to help bring new advertisers on board. Another priority is helping remove the creative barriers around TV advertising, namely, the need to be able to produce a TV ad of high enough quality to run on a large TV screen. On this front, the company says it is investing in automated AI creative production tools, which it will offer free to brands working with Universal Ads.
